A never-ending game of pétanque turns into a lesson in the fine art of living
in the moment for Michael Wright

One of the things I love about rural French life is being able to go around to someone's house for drinks and play pétanque until long after the cows have come home. I do not know why this should be. But the lack of such a game – a backyard pastime, sometimes involving skill and strong liquor – strikes me as a gap in British culture. We simply have no equivalent. Lawn darts or swingball, anyone? Hey! Where did everybody go?

Never mind that we Brits invented jactus lapidum in the 13th century, and became so hung up on bowls that Edward III felt obliged to ban the game on the basis that it was interfering with our archery. Never mind that every middle-class family in Britain bought a set of carpet boules from Habitat in the Seventies. These days, bowls requires such a large and immaculate lawn that you really need to be the Queen to play it, or else join a club peopled with pipe-smoking mystics who can make their shots curve just by muttering peg-peg-peg at them. So your British male prefers to cut out the middle man, and play his drinking games, not with spheroids, but with drinks.

Tonight, our friends Éliane and Laurent have invited us for an apéro in their Stepford-perfect garden and, because pétanque has been mooted, I have brought along my own boules. I know this risks making me look a bit keen and, sure enough, Laurent eyes my equipment with suspicion. Even after nine years of usage, my balls still look alarmingly shiny and new. They were eye-wateringly expensive, too, and I have spent the past nine years wishing I had picked up a rusty old set from a vide grenier (jumble sale), which is what everyone else does. Cannonballs do not wear out, after all. And there are already plenty of them in France to go around. So only a fool buys new ones.

e_SDLqTiens, I see you are very keen," says Laurent, with a screwdriver in one hand and a glass of beer in the other. He is busily making wooden shutters for the house, because this is what Éliane has decreed.

"I turned professional at the age of three," I tell him. "I practise 23 hours a day. By the time I have finished with you, you will be a broken man."

"A broken man?" He turns slightly pale. "Are you sure that you are happy to play here in our little yard?"

"No, no, I was joking." Even now, I forget just how wide is the gulf between French and English humour. Although, to be fair, nobody laughs at my jokes in English, either. "Really, I'm useless. Utterly hopeless. Absolument nul."

Unfortunately, this only makes things worse. Laurent looks quite unwell. For it is just not French to put yourself down. No, in France you build yourself up to make yourself seem bigger.

In Britain, it's the other way round. A chap's willingness to be self-effacing is a sign of his confidence. Except in business and The X Factor, obviously.

Ask a Brit how good they are at tennis, and if they say "I'm not bad", then you are probably talking to Andy Murray. Even "I'm rubbish" means they are really quite good. Indeed, the only way to convince a fellow Englishman that you are genuinely hopeless is to tell him that you are exceptionally talented. Which is where I went wrong with Laurent.

"I'm sure you can't be that bad," says the poor chap now, cringing on my behalf. And then I throw my first boule, and it nearly lands in the neighbour's garden. Lips pursed, we both stare at it. Peg-peg-peg, I think to myself, too late.

I ought to mention that the standard of pétanque in your average French village tends to be absurdly high, largely because unemployment is so high in rural France. But Laurent cannot be much good, because he runs a steelworks in Limoges, and spends all his spare time making shutters for his wife.

His first boule lands one millimetre from the tiny wooden jack, or cochonnet, eight yards away.

"Your turn," he coughs. I lob another boule, and this one lands only about six feet short. And then another, and this one flies five feet past. Almost without looking, Laurent flings his two remaining boules, landing them both no more than six inches from the cochonnet. "Home advantage," he says, kindly. "You'll get to know the terrain."

Things go downhill from here, especially when Éliane and Alice come out to watch. Bien tirée," I say, for the umpteenth time, as Laurent blasts another of my boules into the hedge. "It's such a great game." "Yes, it feels good to slow down," he replies, glancing at Éliane. "To take the time to play."

We talk little. And, seven minutes later, he has beaten me 13-2. This must be one of the speediest drubbings I have known, in a pétanque career littered with speedy drubbings.

Next, with Laurent heading off to a business dinner, Éliane proposes that she and I take on her sister and Alice in a game of doubles. So begins the slowest game of pétanque in the world, largely because we are all equally useless. And I mean that in the true French sense.

With dusk falling, our first game is still going on. We are all flagging and neither team is close to reaching 13 points. In the house, various children have collapsed in a post-Haribo stupor. In the trees, even the squirrels are begging to be allowed to go to sleep.

And still my fellow players talk and talk, in the longueurs between shots, about everyone they know and a few they don't know; about methods of pruning trees; Laurent's abilities as a DIY man; the half-term dates for next term; Laurent's failure to put away his tools; the way the English in France never shut their shutters; why Michael's boules look so new and shiny; and so on.

And then it dawns on me, even as I am looking at my watch for the 93rd time, what a ridiculous hypocrite I am being, with my impatience at their happy chatter. For is not its slowness the very essence of pétanque?

Indeed, the rural French strike me as being far better than I am at the simple business of enjoying a moment, or myriad moments strung together, with little or no regard for how long such a pleasure takes.

This could be why we have no equivalent popular sport in Britain: because we are always in a hurry; always impatient for the next event or sensation or thought.

It would do many of us good to slow down; to go around to someone's house for drinks, and play pétanque until long after the cows have come home.